Epic Parenting

Sky’s flushing red from today’s long race and children lie in beds and I sit on worn chair in the hallway. It’s my nightly post, seat at day’s finish line.

From chair there under light, I open pages and read into doorways, into those bedrooms with children tucked under quilts, children waiting (or not) for sleep to slip under covers too.

I’ve found our bookmark in Little House in the Prairie, opened to where we’d left off last night.

“No! Don’t read us a story!” Child voice calls from a pillow. “Plllleease don’t read us a story. Tell us a story! Tell us a story about you.”

And it strikes me: children need us to do more than read story. They want us to tell story–our personal ones.

The Bible is our Grand Story, drama stacked on drama. And after each meal, the eating of physical bread, our family reads from Scripture, feasts on spiritual bread. I’ve passed bowls and now young hands pass out our “gathering Words,” a set of 8 Bibles of the same version, and our voices read verses in unison, slowly savoring. Storytelling around the table. The words of the God stories linger in our mouths, and we say them aloud to each other, just as Scripture was first lived for the early church: stories spoken aloud in the gathering.

Together, we read The Story.

But what of the other story children need to nourish souls, minds? Won’t we have to tell our own stories, how our lives, today, and God intersect?

This living in story, God’s story and ours, is Epic Parenting, and it’s the way of Jesus: “The followers came to Jesus and asked, “Why do you use stories to teach the people?” (Matt. 13:10)

Jesus didn’t lead by lecturing. He didn’t sermonize, pontificate, moralize or summarize. He knew well what as a parent I too often forget: Lecturing grinds away at faith.

Simply, Jesus told stories and let the stories alone speak. Because a story’s beauty and potency is twofold, doubly powerful.

First, a story gives children a practical prototype. In seeing, hearing, visualizing how Biblical truth reacts when it hits the air of this earth, our fallen flesh, story offers a life simulator like no other. Children see God’s principles test driven. The ethereal becomes concrete; not only does story breathe three-dimensional life into doctrine, but the story prototype now offers a way for children to imitate.

Secondly, the story-prototype powerfullyprompts. Any fact or principle that enters into our brains wrapped in emotion is more likely to be remembered. Thus, while the emotions of a story deeply move, they actually offer the greatest hope of remembering truth and being changed by it. The prompt offered by the story’s prototype ultimately inspires children to live in new ways.

Epic Parenting, parenting out of story, both in the pages of Scripture and the warp of our lives, is potent stuff for our children not only because it’s a faith prototype and a prompt to live the faith, but it is peripateo, the way faith’s robes are passed from generation to the next. Deuteronomy 6: 6-7 urges, “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children, talk about them when you sit at home and walk along the road.”

Practical and participatory, telling God’s story, both in Scripture and in our lives, is peripateo, the Greek word for walking–teaching through story as a natural outflow of our talking and sitting and walking with our children.

Epic parenting is storytelling around our togetherness – about what God wrote during this morning’s errands, during our vacation last year, from our own childhoods. No curriculum, classes or other paraphernalia necessary. Just a willingness to listen to our lives and tell the whole of God’s epic–the parchment story and personal stories.

God says our lives, tarnished and tainted as the characters that traipse through Scripture, are nothing short of living epistles (2 Cor. 3:3); our lives, lines He reads as His very own poetry. (Poiema in the Greek of Eph. 2:10).

Is it any wonder then that our children want us to tell the stories God writes on our days?

In fading light, I lay the storybook of Laura and Mary and Baby Carrie down on my lap. And children prop up on pillows, ready for a true, real-time epic, and slowly words come …. Because we love to tell the story.

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But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.And when he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. ~ John 10:2-4

“Know his voice”… It’s at this point many of us get bogged down, confused , or even fearful ~ feeling and thinking, “But I Don’t know His voice!”
It’s also at this point that we can and should take a deep breath if necessary, relax, and be at peace, resting in and trusting our Good Shepherd! Our ability to follow Him does not rest on us alone because our Good Shepherd will Not fail us or forsake us (Hebrews 13:5), nor will He suffer us to be lost! (Matthew 18:12, Luke 15:4)

The verse cited at the beginning says He calls us “by name”. Often in the trials and business of life ~ and particularly, even, in the midst of our service ~ it’s easy to lose track of the Reality that we are uniquely and individually loved by God Himself! (Matt. 10:30,
Lk 12:7) He sees us, Knows us, and Loves us deeply!
(1 Corinthians 13: 12)

1 Cor. 13 also tells us that love never fails (v. 8) and 1 John tells us that God is love (4:8), so here again are Truths we can rely on ~ and rest in, and be at peace in!

This isn’t to say there aren’t things we can do to help ourselves be familiar with His voice. We already know what those things are and the enemy of our souls works hard to both keep us from them, and then turns to accuse and berate us for not pursuing those thing “enough”. Let’s just raise a shield of faith stamped with Rom. 8:1 against the accusations of the enemy and turn our face to the Sun of Righteousness instead. (Malachi 4:2) Then let us follow follow our Good Shepherd in peace and trust as He leads us day by day. (Matt. 6:34)